No matter what your product is or the type of business you run, customer service is king. Did you know that 52% of customers would be willing to pay a higher price for products or services if they could also expect a higher level of customer service? The difference between good and great customer service can have an unbelievable impact on the overall success of your business.
So, how do you know if you have a good enough support system? Well, support metrics are your best friend. Knowing how to calculate these metrics and use them to improve both your product and support service is a sure way to get that high lifetime value (LTV) you’re looking for.
If you want to know what support metrics you should be tracking for your SaaS, stick around! This article explains everything you need to know, including:
- What are Support Metrics?
- Why Track Support Metrics?
- The Top 5 Support Metrics to Track
- Track Whatsapp Customer Support Metrics
- How to Increase LTV in SaaS
What are Support Metrics?
Support metrics are any metrics related to your customer support department. You can usually group these into 3 main categories:
- The productivity of your customer support process
- The performance of your support team
- The quality of your support experience
By analyzing all of your metrics, you are able to get an overall picture of the efficacy of your existing customer support and identify the areas that need improvement
The majority of support metrics are usually measured through the support channels themselves. Then you can analyze the data in order to get a better idea of the areas within your customer support that need improvement. There are also product success platforms out there that can gather all your metrics from multiple channels in one place to streamline this entire process.
Why Track Support Metrics?
Tracking your support metrics is vital in order to optimize your customer support and provide the best experience for your users. Tracking support metrics allows you to:
- Measure product success: The tickets you receive in customer support will tell you exactly which areas of your product customers are having issues with and determine the overall success of your product.
- Receive customer feedback: Your support process is one of the best ways to get direct feedback from your customers. They provide the qualitative metrics that are key to making better support.
- Monitor the performance of CS agents: The satisfaction of your customers rely heavily on your support team. Various metrics can help identify the superheroes of your team and those who are, well, not doing so good…
By doing the above, you then have the information you need to:
- Optimize your support processes: Your data will show you which support channels are the most effective and which support agents are performing best, so you know exactly where to invest your resources for serious results.
- Improve your product: Are the majority of your customers facing issues in the same area of your product? Well, it’s a sure sign that you need to improve it. Keep doing this, and you’ll have an all-around incredible product.
- Create the best customer experience: By optimizing your customer support and product, you’ll see the difference in your customer experience and overall satisfaction. Your customers will become ambassadors for your brand, ensuring a high lifetime value.
The Top 5 Support Metrics to Track
There are so many support metrics you can track throughout your entire customer support process. Bringing these together is how you will be able to get a thorough overview of how your product and customer support services are performing.
Although each metric plays its part, these are the top 5 support metrics that you definitely shouldn’t miss!
1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The customer satisfaction score, commonly known as CSAT, measures the level of satisfaction a customer has when they interact with a product or service. It’s a qualitative measure that is key for optimizing support since you’re receiving feedback directly from the customers themselves. You can read more about the CSAT score and how to measure it in this CSAT in SaaS article.
Here are some of our top tips to improve your CSAT:
- Encourage users to leave feedback by providing a quick online survey. You can place these either inside your customer support to measure their experiences there or within the product itself to measure product satisfaction.
- A CSAT score of 75-85% is the sweet spot, so keep applying your customers’ feedback and encouraging more users to give their insights until you reach it.
2. Average response time
The average response time is the median amount of time it takes to respond to your customers. This metric is absolutely crucial – users expect a quick response. The average response time is around 12 hours, while 12% of users expect a response in just 15 minutes. Yikes. By tracking this metric, you can monitor any improvement within your customer support team or channels. This will also have a huge impact on other support metrics like CSAT or your average resolution time.
Reduce your average response time by:
- Using a centralized support system where your support team can access messages from one place. This means no tickets are lost or forgotten about, no matter what channel they’re from.
- Creating automated messages for first responses using a simple template. This can help notify users of the expected time they will receive a real response or can point them in the right direction toward self-service support.
3. Average resolution time
Like average response time, average resolution time (ART) is also crucial for happy customers. It’s a no-brainer; customers want their issues solved immediately. You can calculate ART by finding the median time it takes for issues to be resolved, i.e., how long a ticket is open. The ART for most companies is around 5 minutes.
Here are some sure ways to get that ART metric down:
- Optimize your knowledge base with lots of support articles and guides so that your team can direct customers to the exact information they need to solve their issues.
- Make sure your support agents are experts in everything so that they know the exact solution to every customer’s problem. You can do this by providing them with the ultimate employee onboarding.
4. Ticket volume
Tracking ticket volume is probably the best starting point since it shows you exactly how much support you’re going to need to offer your customers. By monitoring ticket volume each day, you can see if there are any spikes in tickets that correlate to other things, like new feature releases, product updates, etc. This keeps you better informed on how to prepare when something like this happens again in the future.
You can reduce ticket volume by:
- Making self-service support the priority so that customers make this their first point of contact rather than sending a message to your support team.
- Updating your resources constantly so that whenever there is a new feature or update in your product, there are already helpful articles and guides with the latest information within your knowledge base.
5. Number of tickets reopened
Are you finding that customers are often reopening the same issue they had before? That’s a big no-no. Tracking the number of tickets reopened by customers can help you identify whether certain resources aren’t clear or whether there is a deeper issue with your product or service itself.
You can help avoid ticket reopening by:
- Checking up on your customers after providing support to confirm whether the issue has been fully resolved and whether they need any further assistance.
- Give incentives to support agents to provide the right solution the first time – if a particular support agent has more ticket reopenings than others, it’s worth re-educating them about the product.
Track Whatsapp Customer Support Metrics
With over 2 billion users worldwide and the most active monthly users than any other messaging platform, Whatsapp is one of your most valuable channels for customer support. This channel, in particular, can offer you some incredible insights into your support performance, including many of the metrics mentioned above. Read our article on how to track Whatsapp metrics to optimize your support team’s performance for more information.
How to Increase LTV in SaaS
Yes, your support processes are absolutely crucial in order to optimize your product, keep customers happy, and ultimately improve that all-important LTV. Like many SaaS companies, you may have a lot of different support channels, so it may be quite a long and complex process to collate all your metrics in one place. That’s why we recommend having a centralized customer support system like FROGED to make tracking metrics so much easier.
Start your free trial with FROGED to create a personalized customer support system for your SaaS and enjoy the following benefits:
- Implement an omnichannel support system for your team
- Automate messages and processes within your support cycle
- Optimize your knowledge base for self-service support
- Create personalized in-app messages
- Make the most of 3k integrations
Best of luck!